


In Event of Moon Disaster

by Orokiah



Category: Impact (2008)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Framing Story, M/M, Post-Movie, Pre-Movie, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-20
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-19 03:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/568572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Orokiah/pseuds/Orokiah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alex and Roland have far more history than books will ever record.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Event of Moon Disaster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alley_Skywalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/gifts).



_Little has been seen of Alex Kittner in the eighteen months since he and Sergei Pitinkov touched back down on Earth. Despite the loss of their colleagues, Doctor Roland Emerson and Flight Commander Courtney Batterton, their mission was, by any standards, a resounding success. Both halves of the moon—split by the explosion that ejected the foreign mass from its core_ — _have settled into a stable orbit. Scientists believe that, over time, it will reform into a cruder ball. The moon's new, closer orbit has caused disruptions to satellites, and altered tidal patterns across the globe. Both are considered an acceptable trade-off, the alternative being annihilation._

_Sources report that Doctor Kittner continues to teach part-time at the University of Ottawa's Department of Physics and Astronomy. His last official public appearance was at a ceremony in Washington, during which he was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal. The honour was also awarded to Cosmonaut Pitinkov, and posthumously to Batterton and Emerson. Kittner has been inundated with offers to speak and write about his experience, all of which he has declined. His spokesperson has refused to confirm reports that he called a talk radio show, debating whether he and Pitinkov were right to return to Earth, without attempting to save Doctor Emerson._

_In the absence of Kittner's perspective, the scientific community and the world at large continue to analyse the decisions he, Emerson and Doctor Maddie Rhodes, head of the White House advisory team, made in the lead up to the mission. “Kittner's not the guy who advocated trying to blow up the moon,” says J. Robert Kingsley, former Vice President in the Taylor administration, who resigned from office after the mission and is now an outspoken critic of Taylor. “If the President had listened to him and his team instead of a general with a planet-sized chip on his shoulder, the moon's orbit could have been fixed a whole lot sooner—without such catastrophic loss of life.”_

_Alex Kittner, too, is not without his critics. He has two Nobel prizes, honours and plaudits from a hundred and eighty-four countries, and a Wikipedia entry that proclaims him, free of citation, 'one of the men who saved the world'. But his role in Emerson's death has come under scrutiny, and the classification of the body lodged in the moon remains the focus of heated discussion. Doctor Kittner's credentials are not in doubt. Yet, according to noted British astrophysicist Patrick Bainbridge: “What Alex Kittner knows about magnetism could be written on the back of a postage stamp...”_

  


  


“He was misquoted,” Alex said, as Martina paused for breath. He judged from the quiver of her chin that she was regretting it. Even in the shelter of the deck, any lull in conversation made their teeth start to chatter.

“'What Alex Kittner _doesn't_ know about magnetism'?”

“He said _electro_ magnetism. It's the same line he used on CLN. Live and exclusive from London, England... I was watching.” He accepted the magazine from her, flicking through the rest of the article. “David Rhodes sure has come a long way from the DC News. This is an edited extract from his 'forthcoming new book'... _Shadow of the Moon: Heroes, Villains, and a Very Modern Cover-Up_.”

“It will sit very nicely on your shelf, next to your three unauthorised biographies.”

“I'm not the one collecting all this crap, Martina.” Alex eyed the table between them, piled high with newspapers, magazines and printouts. Scissor blades ghosted white in the dark, both sides of the moon staring up at him. He placed the magazine, face down, on top of them. “It belongs on a bonfire, not in a scrapbook.”

She shrugged, pulling the blanket he'd insisted on tighter around her shoulders. “I find it—how do you say it—”

“Cathartic?”

“Cathartic. Yes. Helpful. For the longest time, Alex, I couldn't look at any of these stories. It hurt even to think of them. The only reason I saved them at all was for my son.”

“And I think that's great. But when he wants to know about his father, all he has to do is ask you. The rest of the world can write about Roland—about all the rest of us—until they're blue in the face. But they knew nothing about him.”

“Your latest biography says you were born in Toronto, in 1964.”

“I was born in '63,” Alex said. “Which is precisely the point I'm making.”

“And you first met Roland at a party in Darmstadt.”

“London. A symposium on neutron stars and strong electromagnetic fields. Roland arrived forty minutes late, and four weeks too early. Turned out the geologists were meeting _next_ month, and he'd hitchhiked all the way from Dover for nothing. It was okay, he said. It had been quite exciting...”

“You see,” Martina said gently, “even I didn't know that.”

Alex realised he'd been looking up. He tore his eyes from the sky and glanced across. Martina was smiling, savouring the anecdote. Her face, still pinched with sadness, had lit up like the lantern glowing bright behind her. It had been harder on Martina than anyone: bringing a baby into the world she had to raise alone, mourning the man she loved, while the rest of humanity swapped solemn reflection for a party. No amount of eulogies could disguise the naked sense of _relief_ , the uninvited guest at each of Roland's memorials. _So sorry your husband's dead; at least he connected that transmitter in time to save the rest of us._

For all the bags of newsprint Martina had arrived here toting, he knew that none of it contained the story she'd flown three thousand miles to hear.

He cleared his throat and thought back, shedding extraneous detail, and choosing his words with care.

“The press has gotten some things right. I majored in physics at Queen's, and early on, I had a summer job at a planetarium. That's where Amanda and I met. I used some God-awful line on her: _binary star means two, how about me and you_ —that kind of thing. Anyway, it worked, somehow. Then, while I was doing my graduate work, I met Ian Wilson. He was a real inspiration: a mentor, I guess you'd call him. I moved over to London for a while to do some research for my doctorate, and it got under my skin. I took every excuse I could to go back. Amanda's mom was sick back then, and she had her dad. She wanted to be near them, and as much as I loved London, I loved her more.

“If it wasn't for Amanda, I would have packed my bags and left for Europe. And I probably would have stayed there...”

  


  


_Alex could tell Pat Bainbridge didn't like Roland Emerson, right from the off. The sneer on his face as he skidded through the door, scruffy and unshaven, turned to lofty disdain when he explained, in fluent, accented English, the reason for the delay. The only time he liked getting on airplanes, Roland said, was when he planned to jump out of them._

_“I swear the post-grads are getting stranger,” Pat whispered to Alex._

_Roland stuck around for the rest of the session, since he had nowhere else to go. It wasn't his field, but he seemed more interested than intimidated. Alex warmed to him when he interrupted Pat; more when he corrected his math. He was too self-assured to kiss up to the egos on display, and smart enough not to need to._

_“What are you going to do?” Alex asked at the drinks break. “Stick around here for a while, or head back to Germany?”_

_Roland was impressed. The English sometimes mistook him for French. Alex could relate, since most of them thought he was American._

_“I'll find a hostel,” he said. “I could always spend some time hunting for meteorites...”_

_“Most people would go to Madame Tussaud's,” Alex said._

_Roland grinned; that quick, brilliant smile that said_ he _wasn't most people. As Pat hovered behind him, rolling his eyes, opening his mouth to say something pompous, Alex made his mind up._

_“If you need some place to crash...” he began._

_Ian Wilson had inherited a place in London from his grandmother. He'd never have afforded it otherwise. He lived in Manchester most of the time, and rented out the London pad on short-term leases. Alex usually stayed there, whenever he was in town. Roland stayed for a fortnight; twelve days longer than he'd promised to. He was an excellent house guest: he took his shoes off when he came in, and replaced the milk when he drank it. He did his own thing most of the time, consumed by his research. He also did most of the cooking, on the nights he remembered to eat._

_Roland tagged along when Alex headed up to Jodrell to meet with Ian, having never been there. On the way back, swapping stories of how they'd gotten interested in science, he told Alex that as a child, he'd found what he thought was a meteorite. It turned out to be plain old basalt, but it sparked his passion for geology. He'd been obsessed with meteorites, and their origins, ever since._

 _For Alex, it had been the moon landing. It was also the first thing he remembered, as sharp and clear as yesterday._

_“I have yet to find a lunar meteorite,” Roland said. “I would very much like to study one.”_

_“You might have to go to Antarctica for that. Or maybe the moon.”_

_“I have no interest in being an astronaut,” he said, taking it far more seriously than Alex had meant. “My head may be in the stars, but my feet are staying firmly on the ground.”_

_“Except when you're jumping out a plane?”_

_“I'm also going climbing this weekend. And you are coming with me.”_

_Alex spluttered a protest that involved reruns of_ The Jetsons _, the fact that heights made him queasy, and the workings of gravity. He concluded, “You're not going to find a piece of the moon scaling walls in Lambeth.”_

_“We are not looking for the moon,” Roland said. “We are looking for some interesting cliff exposures on the Isle of Portland. And also your sense of adventure.”_

_“I'm sure it'll make a fine footnote to your thesis.”_

_“It will be the greatest scientific find in a century. Books,” Roland declared, with a waggle of his eyebrows, “may be written.”_

_Like most great minds, Roland had a steely focus that bordered on self-absorption. It made him seem scatty, disinterested in anything but his research, and the grand ambitions that went with it. He was too restless to stay in one place for too long, unless that place was the lab; or some remote corner of a desert, where he'd heard nomads had seen something fall from the sky. Early one morning Alex woke to find him gone, some money left under a half-drained cup on the coffee table, the bathroom still wet and thick with steam._

_There was no note. Instead, marked out in the fog on the mirror, were three little words._

  


  


“ _Roland war hier_ ,” Martina said. She shook her head in fond exasperation.

“ _Roland was here_ ,” Alex translated. “His favourite calling card. Though I didn't figure that out till later.”

“You've seen his scribblings, haven't you? All the photographs?”

“The great wall of fame. Yeah, I've seen them.”

“The Deutsches Museum has asked if I would consider lending them,” Martina said. She picked at the edge of the blanket, looking pensive. “They want to do an exhibition.”

“Roland would probably be all for it. He'd just started displaying them when I saw him in Darmstadt. He was pleased as punch about it.”

“So there _was_ a party,” Martina said.

“More of a polite kind of gathering, at ESA. Flat champagne and lots of complaining. Roland may or may not have dragged me out on the town later on...”

Martina pursed her lips in mock disapproval. Alex just smiled.

“We'd kept in touch after London. I still spent as much time there as I could, but Amanda and I had moved to the States by then, gotten engaged. I was working with NASA, developing theory-based applications. Turning the hugely impractical into prototypes, essentially. And that's where I met Maddie. Maddie Fields. As she was back then...”

  


  


_There was little sacred about science, in Alex's opinion. Boundaries existed to be pushed at; facts were only facts until successfully challenged. The world had been flat, once upon a time, until the ancient Greeks proved it wasn't. The Earth had been the centre of the universe, before Copernicus came along. Pluto was only the ninth planet still because no one had thought up a mnemonic that didn't need the P._

_Maddie didn't agree about Pluto, even when he used more convincing rationale. And she was openly sceptical about the work his team was doing. What he viewed as cutting edge, an exciting way to buck convention, she considered a waste of funding._

_“A space elevator is the stuff of science fiction,” she said. “You'll be trying to break the speed of light, next.”_

_“I'll give you a wave from Alpha Centauri,” Alex said. He added, to wind her up, “This week we're looking at a proposal for an artificial moon.”_

_“What's wrong with the one we've got?” Maddie demanded, looking suitably incensed. Red-cheeked passion was a good look on her. She was so serious all the time, so rigid in her thinking. He liked it when he punctured that cool exterior, and got a glimpse of the woman beneath._

_“So you're the kind of scientist who'll go see a movie and spend the entire time muttering in outrage at the things they got wrong.”_

_“Aren't we all?”_

_Alex had to give her that one. He held his ground on Pluto, though, right to the end. They hadn't spoken in years by the time the IAU downgraded it, severely pissing off the traditionalists, putting it back in the place it should have occupied all along. But it still made him think of Maddie: the place she'd had in his life, and the place that part of him had wanted for her._

_The feelings had been mutual; neither of them needed a telescope to see that. Maddie was with David. He was about to marry Amanda. But the cosy after-hours drinks and flirty astronomic banter told a very different version. They'd orbited around each other, skirted the event horizon, without ever actually crossing it._

_He wanted to think it was his commitment to Amanda—his better judgement—that had stopped them. In reality, it was Maddie's career. She got a job at Mount Palomar, and the next thing he knew he was signing a good luck card someone at work passed around, and realising this was not the way he'd expected things to turn out._

_Roland didn't make it to the wedding. He'd gotten a hot tip about a meteorite, and gone off to the Mojave Desert instead._

_“I meant to come back,” he said when he finally turned up on Alex's doorstep, three weeks overdue. He spread his hands in contrition. “I fully intended to be at the reception...”_

_“But this impact event was way too exciting to miss,” Alex supplied. “As usual...”_

_“I believe it to be Martian,” Roland told him later, face glowing with the thrill. Or maybe it was just the bourbon._

_“It had better_ be a _Martian.”_

_“Well,” Roland said, “perhaps if you had given me an incentive. Made me your best man, for instance...”_

_“We'd still be at the altar now, while you looked for the rings. You're too irresponsible.”_

_“I'm living my dream,” Roland said, unperturbed. His face shifted. “I hope that you are doing the same. That you are happy, Alex. After what happened with Maddie—”_

_“_ Nothing _happened with Maddie,” Alex said, reaching for the bottle._

_“She led you on.”_

_“No, she didn't. And it doesn't matter now, anyway. We're all right where we're meant to be, with who we're meant to be with. Well—except for you. You're too busy running around to actually meet someone.”_

_He pointed at Roland, dispensing some sage advice. There weren't enough years between them that he was really qualified for it, but the ring on his finger was still a strange and heavy weight. It made him feel old, if not exactly wise. “If you don't slow down, you're going to break your neck.”_

_“You would miss me,” Roland said. “Despite the many horrible things you say about me.”_

_“Horrible? They're true. You_ are _irresponsible. You're totally unreliable. You make me dizzy. You're like a—like a whirlwind. You, Roland, are a force of nature. And no one with a brain in their head goes up against a force of nature and hopes to change it. You step out of its path, and let it get on with it.”_

_“Even so.”_

_“Yeah, I'd miss you,” Alex said. “Even so.”_

  


  


“I couldn't help but notice,” Martina offered, treading gingerly, “that you didn't mention Maddie. Not when we talked on the phone. Or when you invited us to stay.”

“Maddie's not in the picture right now,” Alex said. He rubbed at his ear. It felt like it was starting to freeze. “It's complicated.”

She cast a wry glance at the table. “Not according to Us Weekly and OK! Magazine.”

“Everybody likes a happy ending, I guess.”

“You should see what they have to say about Sergei Pitinkov and Courtney Batterton.”

“Whatever it is,” Alex said, “it's definitely not the whole story.” He thought some more about it, frown deepening. “Though there _was_ that one night, during training... I was playing cards with Roland, and the two of them...”

He abandoned the tale, not sure if he'd gone numb, or was too tired of it all to care. “Maddie's great—she really is. But I think we missed our moment. And my kids come first. They've had enough change to cope with already. They lost their mom, and then they watched their grandpa die too, right in front of them. Sadie still has nightmares. They get on with Maddie—Jake loves her to pieces—but that doesn't mean they want a stepmom.”

“What about what _you_ want?”

“I'm not sure what I want, anymore.” He examined Martina more closely, noticing her breath, steaming in the air. “Aside from you not developing pneumonia. Maybe we should go inside.”

She shook her head. “The children are fast asleep. I don't want to wake them. I have the baby monitor, just in case—and I like it out here. It's pretty.”

She didn't say that being outdoors, in the icy embrace of the moon, made her feel close to Roland. Alex heard it loud and clear, all the same.

“I've never been to Canada before,” Martina continued. “The first time you and I met was in Paris.”

“I'd heard all about you long before Paris, Martina...”

Her cheeks flushed pink with pleasure, and more than a hint of embarrassment. He shook off the present and exchanged it, only too gladly, for a part of the past.

  


  


_Alex had predicted that Roland would break his neck, running around the globe in search of objects from space. As it turned out, he was wrong on both counts—which was scant consolation for Roland. His daredevil antics caught up with him anyway. He came off his motorcycle on the way to the dentist, and his neck was pretty much the only thing that stayed intact. He broke his arm and collarbone, punctured a lung, and—since he never did anything by halves—fractured his leg in three separate places._

_“I would have preferred the filling,” he said when Alex stopped by for a visit, en route to London. He'd been released from hospital and was hobbling on a crutch around his apartment in Berlin. He was a pitiful sight: like a bird who'd been caged. He was in plaster up to the eyeballs, popping painkillers like candy. He'd have been climbing the walls in frustration, if only he could reach them._

_“I can't believe they let you home. How the hell are you going to manage?”_

_“Badly,” Roland said with a grimace, as Alex steered him to the couch. “But it was worth it.” He grinned up at Alex. “I have met the woman I'm going to marry.”_

_“Assuming she can pin you down long enough to do it.”_

_“Pins will not be a problem,” Roland said. “I have four in my leg.”_

_Alex set down the crutch, and sat beside him. “Who's the lucky lady, then?”_

_“Her name is Martina. She's a physical therapist—I see her twice a week. She is beautiful. She refuses to date me while I'm her patient, but she likes me. I can tell.” He smiled over at Alex, in a dreamy, medicated haze. “We give ourselves away, you know. All the time. Especially when we're trying not to.”_

_Alex had a flight to catch at six, and a talk to give at ten in the morning. He was so concerned about Roland that he cancelled both. The third phone call he made was to the hospital, an eye all the while on Roland—a mangled sprawl of limbs on the couch—to check he was still breathing. The fourth was to Amanda, to tell her there'd been a change in his schedule and he'd be in Germany for a while instead of the UK. It was still early in Washington. Amanda sounded bone-tired and frazzled. Baby Jake was screaming at the top of his lungs in the background._

_Roland drifted in and out all night, and most of the next day. He muttered things in his sleep that Alex couldn't understand. When he started to stir, Alex pulled up his chair and rattled the bottle of pills at him._

_“Two tablets,” he said. “Three times a day. After meals.”_

_Roland blinked at him like an owl. He squinted in surprise at the bottle. “You can read the label? Your German is terrible.”_

_“It's improving. And I spoke to your doctor. Or rather, he spoke to me. Very slowly. You're supposed to take these things at mealtimes,” he repeated, waiting for it to sink in. “I guess you forgot to feed yourself again.”_

_“I am not a child,” Roland said groggily._

_“Then stop acting like one,” Alex said. He passed over the bottle. Roland took it. “Sit yourself up. I burned you some pasta, and I don't want you choking on it.”_

_“Alex,” Roland began, as he was halfway to the kitchen._

_He turned around. “Yeah?”_

_“Make sure you sign my cast,” Roland said, settling back against his pillow and closing his eyes. “Something with lots of numbers. I want to impress Martina.”_

_Roland smartened himself up somewhat, with Martina in his life. He didn't stop dashing across the world at a moment's notice, and he remained a workaholic—Alex was never sure if he was serious when he told him he'd taken her camping on their second date, so she could carry his tools. But she gave him an anchor; something else to work for, and prove worthy of. Martina had her own life and interests, and wasn't in the least bit wowed by Roland's. He reported to Alex that her eyes glazed over, when he tried to explain what he did. She brought him back down to Earth, the way nothing else ever had._

_ESA announced the first phase of the lunar operation the following year. It was a big deal for Roland, now a rising star at the Institute: the prospect of fresh samples, new data to pore over, made him giddy. Alex had other things on his mind. He listened half-heartedly when Roland called him, juggling his excitement with complaints about Gerhard, his assistant at the lab, and checking on his attendance at the upcoming conference in Paris._

_“You must come, Alex,” he said. “I want to introduce you to Martina.”_

_“You're taking Martina with you?”_

_“A romantic weekend in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.”_

_“You're supposed to be giving a presentation, aren't you?”_

_“I can do both,” Roland said, not seeing the distinction._

_“I don't know, Roland. The baby's due around then. I'm not sure I can make it.”_

_“She will be early,” Roland predicted. “I can feel it.”_

_Roland was a lot better at giving predictions than Alex. Sadie was three weeks old by the time the conference rolled around. Amanda insisted that he go; that they act like everything was normal. It was only one weekend, and her dad had ventured over the border for a visit. Nothing was going to happen over the weekend. Nothing ever did._

_They met for dinner on the Sunday night. By then Alex had started to relax, the frayed edges of his nerves beginning to knit. Roland and Martina cooed over baby pictures; Martina poked fun at Roland over his own extensive gallery, the cherished photos of his scribblings that he'd moved to the walls of his lab. The company was good, and the conversation easy. Home felt a million miles away._

_“I have spent the entire weekend in the hotel spa,” Martina said, as Roland gazed at her in puppy-eyed adoration. “He makes a thousand promises, and keeps not one.”_

_Alex laughed at Roland, who had the sense to look sheepish. “You've got the patience of a saint, Martina. I don't know how you put up with him.”_

_“I've accepted that I have to share him,” she said, squeezing Roland's hand, and looking every bit as smitten. “And that we are in a long-distance relationship. Even though we live in the same city...”_

_“I talked with Patrick Bainbridge earlier,” Roland said. “Did you know they'd brought him in to consult?”_

_Alex nodded. “Don Smithson dropped out. I found out yesterday.”_

_“He is not my biggest fan. Or yours, for that matter.”_

_“He's never been the same since he spent six months on that proof and found the Russians had beaten him to it.”_

_Martina made a noise, low in her throat._

_“We are being as vague as we possibly can be,” Roland protested._

_“I was promised romance,” she said. “And science is not romantic.”_

_“It can be,” Roland said smoothly, moving in for a kiss._

_With spectacular timing, Alex's cell phone rang. They were still new enough then that the sound tended to jolt him, like an electric shock. He glanced at the screen, made his apologies, and went out to the lobby to answer, leaving the lovebirds to it. That was where time seemed to stop. He could never remember, afterwards, how the next half hour unfolded. There were only snapshots. He recalled with hollow precision the smiling faces in the lobby; the rain, drumming down outside; the squeak of his shoes on the sidewalk. Nothing else, until Roland's head appeared around the corner, seeking him out._

_He choked out the details. Amanda had found a lump, while she was pregnant with Sadie. The test results were back. The news wasn't good._

_Roland nodded silently, taking it in. Alex wanted to vomit. That or cry, open-mouthed at the sky. Instead he thumped his palm against the nearest wall: once, twice, again and again. Roland grabbed his arm to stop him. Alex shrugged him off easily; Roland was fitter, but he was broader. He might even have been stronger, but he sure didn't feel it._

_The compassion on Roland's face, water dropping like tears off his cheekbones, finally broke him. Alex gave in, right before his knees did. In the grey of a nameless street, Roland took hold of him while he sobbed into his shoulder; where no one else could see them, and the rain made it all too easy to deny in the morning._

  


  


Martina's eyes were glistening. Her hand had crept across the table, and covered his.

There was iron in her grip that he hadn't expected. Her fingers were long and lean, the pads of her fingertips hiding sharp planes of bone.

It reminded him, in a dim and dangerous way, of Roland.

  


  


_Staying in the States was out of the question, with Amanda sick. Lloyd, her dad, lived in Ottawa, shuffling around alone in the house Amanda had grown up in. It wasn't a complex equation. The answer was obvious, right from the start. They upped stakes and moved in with Lloyd, and they never left._

_Lloyd had always been a curmudgeon. He didn't like driving, and he didn't like flying—something he'd passed down to Amanda. He didn't like Alex driving, either, convinced too much time in England had addled his brain, and he'd forget which side of the road to use. He wasn't quite so phobic, in those days—he even left the house, now and then—but the seeds of it were there. He was suspicious of everything from microwave ovens to Alex's liking for storms, the kind that rattled the roof and made your heart beat faster in the basement. Lloyd didn't appreciate drama, not even on television._

_Alex took an appointment at the university. It came with sensible hours, and kept him close to home. It also allowed him to keep his hand in, to a degree._

_“You know what they say, Alex,” Pat Bainbridge said, when he called to pick holes in a paper he'd published. “Those who can't...”_

_“Go into industry?”_

_Pat had not long accepted a lucrative contract with a multi-national corporation. He sniffed noisily down the line, and changed the subject._

_ESA had pushed back the lunar mission once already. It was postponed yet again in the fall, much to Roland's disappointment._

_“The moon will still be there,” Alex said, looking up at the sky from the window of his office. He pictured Roland doing the same, on the other side of the Atlantic._

_“But the budget might not be.”_

_“They've already allocated the funding. Have a little patience. Come live in the slow lane a while, with the rest of us.”_

_“The slow lane is not my idea of fun,” Roland said. He grumbled some more about bureaucrats and bean-counters, and moved on to another of his least favourite people._

_Alex had no hard proof that Roland disliked Maddie. He'd never met her when she'd been at NASA, but the Institute drew data from observatories all across the world. Once she'd moved to Mount Palomar, it had been only a matter of time before they'd come into contact. Roland had never hidden that fact; Alex had always gotten the impression, though, that Maddie was a task he would have delegated to Gerhard, if he'd trusted him to handle her._

_“Maddie Rhodes is now director of Kitt Peak,” he reported. “She started Tuesday.”_

_Alex felt a distant pang at the name. “It still sounds strange to hear you call her that.”_

_“She asks about you, you know. Occasionally.”_

_“Maybe I should call her,” Alex said. “Congratulate her on the promotion.”_

_“Maybe,” Roland said, tone turning cool, as if Alex had suggested trading his motorcycle for a horse and carriage._

_“I'll do it tomorrow. Next week. I've got a ton of midterms to look at.”_

_He never did call Maddie. Time got away from him, flying past at the speed of light. Jake and Sadie grew older, turning from babies to little people in what felt like the blink of an eye. They remade_ Battlestar Galactica _—the only time he ever fell out with Roland, who was adamant that Starbuck was not a woman, and only changed his mind when he saw her picture. And Amanda, after months of chemo, and the grind of radiotherapy, got better. Colour came back to her skin, and slowly returned to their life._

_Amanda didn't want to leave Canada again, and Lloyd didn't want her to go. The kids were settled, and a little to his surprise, so was Alex. He still longed for London, sometimes, but between his students and thrashing Lloyd at Trivial Pursuit on a regular basis, he was busy enough to push it to the back of his mind. There were conferences in North America, too. Places he could prove he hadn't retired; immerse himself in work, and wash away the fear that had taken root inside him. When Amanda grew stronger, and he grew braver, he attended meetings further afield. Further like Madrid, and Rome, and Cologne...and on one memorable occasion, Havana._

_London he left for last. It was eight and a half months before the meteor shower came calling. And two weeks before the world, the way he'd come to know it, changed forever._

  


  


His mouth was suddenly dry as dust. Alex slid his hand from Martina's and reached for the cup that had been sitting on the table, untouched. The coffee was ice cold by now, washing like tar against the china. The set had been a wedding gift, from one of Amanda's cousins. There were only two pieces left: Sadie had broken the rest holding a picnic in the yard, with an imaginary friend named Sam. Back when she still believed in things like Sam, and Santa Claus, and the man in the moon.

He swallowed the coffee anyway. A German newspaper clipping caught his eye as he set the cup back down. He tugged it out from the pile and held it to the light, trying to gauge how much had slipped away.

“Election results, right? And this bit here, um... _The repercussions for the Eurozone, if this trend continues_...”

“In short,” Martina said, filling in the gaps, “the world leaders responsible for sending you to the moon are not faring well at the polls.”

“I noticed. Edward Taylor's approval rating is at an all-time low. He wouldn't get a third term, even if he could have one.”

“He was feted at first. They awarded him the Peace Prize. You don't find it strange: this sudden swing in opinion?”

“After all the stories? The reports about a cover-up? History judges people, Martina. Some of the time it finds them wanting.” He shrugged. “That's just human nature. That hasn't changed because the moon almost collided with the Earth. There are people who believe it was all a hoax, like Apollo 11. An elaborate excuse to raise taxes. They see the tides, feel the tremors, look up at the sky—and still they question it. They question Taylor, Maddie, Roland, me—”

“Alex—”

“And they should,” he said, sinking back to dispassion. “Because God knows I question myself.”

Martina watched him a moment. She leaned over and took the clipping from him, toying with the edges before she settled it back with the rest.

“Your German is not as bad as you claim,” she said.

“You're a kinder judge than Roland.”

“And you are much too harsh.” She smiled in reproof and picked up her own cup, hugging it between her hands as if it warmed them, though the contents had to be equally as frozen as his. “You haven't finished your story,” she said, holding him in a steady, measured gaze.

The answering smile on his lips started to fade. He took a slow breath and said, with a calm he didn't feel, “The rest isn't easy to tell.”

“Take your time,” Martina said. “We have all the time in the world. Thanks to you. Thanks to Roland.”

Alex considered how to say it; what to keep in, and what to leave out. He thought for what seemed like hours, Martina waiting patiently across from him. Constellations glittered above in the clear, cold sky. There was no chance of a cloud coming along to hide the moon. It hovered bright overhead, intent on being seen, whichever way he looked.

Finally, lips on the point of turning blue in the silence, he bowed to the inevitable.

“I saw Roland, when I was in London. It wasn't planned that way. I was going over there to see Ian, and I mentioned it in passing. I'd barely stepped off the plane, when he turned up on the doorstep...”

  


  


_“I have lost Martina,” Roland announced, looking wild-eyed and dishevelled. “She said it wasn't working. She said I spend too much time at work, and not enough with her.”_

_“And what did you say?”_

_Roland threw himself down on the couch, fiddling with one of Grandma Wilson's embroidered cushions. “I asked her to marry me.”_

_“And she said..?” Alex prompted, returning from the kitchen in time to catch the end of the sentence._

_“She said she would think about it...when she ran out of more important things to think about.” He winced at the words. “And then she slammed the phone down. My ears are still ringing.”_

_Alex clicked off the TV, where Hal Boon was rhapsodising about the eclipse in Sydney. He tossed over a beer; thinking of exchanging it, for Ian's well-concealed stash of tequila. “You proposed to Martina_ over the phone _?”_

_“It seemed a good idea at the time,” Roland said defensively. “She is visiting her mother in Munich—she wanted me to come, but I am much too busy. Since Gerhard quit...”_

_“I thought you fired him?”_

_“I was planning to propose over dinner, when she got back. Candles, roses, moonlight... And now I will never get the chance. Martina will never marry me now. I waited too long. I have called her repeatedly, sent a hundred texts, and she refuses to answer. I've lost her, Alex... It's over.”_

_“So you grabbed the first flight here instead of the train to Munich?”_

_Roland paused his tale of woe long enough to consider the answer. “It seemed a good idea at the time..?”_

_“First off,” Alex said, “I'm pretty jet-lagged. I just got here, and you're wearing me out. Calm the hell down. Second... Martina will cool off. She's probably just keeping you hanging. Giving you a taste of your own medicine.”_

_Roland perked up a moment, then sagged back down. “No. No, it's over. She doesn't believe I'm serious about her. I have lost her. For good.” He held up the beer with a sigh. “I think I may need something stronger...”_

_“I'll go get the tequila,” Alex said._

_Roland wasn't the only one with relationship problems. Alex was having a difference of opinion with Amanda, and it had started to fester. She wanted another baby; the treatment didn't always leave people sterile, and she thought it was worth the risk. Alex didn't. They had two healthy, amazing kids already. He'd dug his heels in, with no intention of moving._

_“You are much too stubborn,” Roland said._

_Alex—being stubborn—refused to admit it._

_He'd told himself it was because of Amanda, that he'd left it so long to come back to London. But he stood there on the balcony one night, looking out at the view, and felt the truth whisper, at the edge of his awareness. This was as much Europe as Madrid, or Rome—as far as travel went, anyway; the rest was An Issue, of semi-thorny proportions—but he'd purposely excluded it as a destination. Even when Amanda's health had no longer been a concern. London was bright, and bold, and alive: it made him feel the same way._

_London made him reckless. It moved things in him that scared him half to death._

_“For all I knew,” he said to Roland, “you could have been a serial killer. Battered me over the head with one of your rocks.”_

_“I would never waste my rocks that way,” Roland said, deadly serious, “even if I were inclined to do so.”_

_“Lucky for me you turned out to be an expert on planetary geology, instead.”_

_“And you a highly respected, world-renowned professor of astrophysics...”_

_“You read the article, didn't you?”_

_Mischief tugged at Roland's lips. “It may possibly have popped up in my inbox.”_

_“Peter is an old friend of Amanda's,” Alex said. “He works on the city paper. He asked for a quote...”_

_Roland folded his arms on the rail, and raised his eyes to the sky. “According to highly respected, world-renowned professor of astrophysics Alex Kittner, the manned phase of the mission is history in the making. 'Not since 1972 has mankind walked on the moon,' Doctor Kittner says. 'It's enormously exciting both for scientists and the billions of people who were born too late to witness this thrilling feat of courage, and technological endeavour.' Canada, as an associate member of the European Space Agency...”_

_“That is_ not _what I said. Not in so many words, anyhow.” He scowled up at the moon. “You didn't need to memorise it.”_

_“I didn't,” Roland said. His fingers tapped out a rhythm on the metal. “I just happened to remember.”_

_Lots of things had changed since they were last in London. The skyline was subtly altered, and in ways large and small, so were the people. Ian Wilson's hair had turned white. He'd worked with Roland by now, and knew him well: he greeted him as a respected colleague, instead of an enthusiastic stray that Alex had picked up, somewhere along the line. Pat Bainbridge had wormed himself inside a TV studio. It was a bi-monthly slot on_ Blue Peter _, but that didn't stop him holding court on the subject, like it was his very own show._

_“I consider it a privilege to educate the masses,” he said, swirling brandy around his glass. “The world's always in need of experts, gentlemen.”_

_Even the weather seemed different. Alex remembered London as cool: a shrine to crisp air, and overcast skies. But it was late in summer, and the city sweltered under a heatwave. The buildings flared in reflected light; the Eye sparked like a pinwheel, even in the daytime. The air grew charged, the heat both taut and oppressive. Every day became a battle._

_There was only one way it was ever going to end._

_He saw the storm coming—welcomed it, even. The thing that caught him off-guard was the power cut. One second rain was lashing the glass, wind blowing a gale beyond. The next, the lights had fritzed, and gone altogether, and everything went black. Every building on the street was thrown into shadow. Roland found a flashlight that lasted all of five minutes. Alex had better luck, unearthing a dusty box of candles. Work had already begun to restore the power; in the meantime they sat in darkness, in that nebulous space between the night, and the flicker of flame._

_“My nine-year-old would think this was great,” Alex said. “He'd want me to tell him a ghost story. Scare his sister silly.”_

_“What sort of ghost story?”_

_“The sort that begins, 'It was a dark and stormy night'...”_

_The building was old, and draughty. Wind whistled through the eaves, thunder cracking like a whip. Both of them jumped. Both of them pretended they hadn't._

_“You have thought about moving here,” Roland said, as Alex felt around for his cell phone._

_“Sometimes,” he admitted, finding it flat and unresponsive. He tossed it away, resigned. “Haven't you ever thought about it? Moving some place else?”_

_“It has crossed my mind,” Roland said. “Sometimes.”_

_“This place holds a lot of memories. There's lots of things I like about London...”_

_“The chocolate,” Roland guessed. Alex threw a cushion at him. He ducked to avoid it, and slid off the chair. He settled himself down on the floor, as if he'd planned it. “The weather? The accents?..”_

_“Yeah,” Alex said, absently. Some things just were: he'd never tried to distill it down to reason. “I guess more than anything, it's the buzz.”_

_“You should try skydiving.”_

_Alex joined him on the floor, the suggestion resurrecting his vertigo. “I'd really rather not.”_

_“It's the next best thing to flying,” Roland insisted._

_“How would you know? Unless you've sprouted wings since the last time I saw you. Which I wouldn't put past you. I wouldn't put_ anything _past you, Roland...”_

_Roland smiled, mouth a familiar, shaded outline. “It just is,” he said._

_“Well, like this crazy young geologist once said to me, my feet are staying firmly on the ground.”_

_Lightning sliced through the gloom. In the flash he could see Roland's face, clear as daylight. He looked surprised, and strangely moved. But mostly surprised: like the words had knocked him off balance as much as the cushion._

_“You remember that too,” he said._

_“Vividly.”_

_Roland tilted his head; as if weighing something up, inside of it. “Do you also remember your wedding?”_

_“Sometimes I forget the date,” Alex said, frowning at the candles. They seemed dimmer than they had, in the retinal shock of the lightning._

_“I don't mean your anniversary,” Roland said._

_“It's getting darker in here,” Alex decided. “Those candles aren't lasting.”_

_“They're bound to burn out quickly. They're old.”_

_He flexed a hand, knuckles popping; thinking about Ian and his hair, and the other changes that had crept up on him, settled silent and unnoticed in his bones, in the years since they'd met. “I know the feeling.”_

_“I don't doubt it,” Roland said, deadpan, secure in his six-year advantage._

_“Enjoy it while it lasts,” Alex said. “I've never broken so much as a toenail. You'll be bent double by the time you're fifty.”_

_Roland lobbed another cushion. Alex didn't see it coming, any more than he had the power cut. It hit him square in the head and rebounded to the hearth, where most of the candles sat. Two of them toppled over, dropping like dominoes. He watched in heart-thumping dismay, laughter frozen in his throat, as the flames licked at the rug, and began to spread. Both of them sprang over, but it was Roland who reacted first. He smothered the nascent fire with the cushion that had caused it, beating at the embers. Soon there was nothing left but a thin whorl of smoke, rising from the floor._

_“That's going to leave a mark,” Alex said, adrenaline racing through his veins. It made him shiver._

_He reached out blindly for the cushion, and found an arm instead. The skin was raised in gooseflesh. Roland trembled slightly at the touch._

_“Hey. It's okay. We're okay...”_

_The silence stretched. He could hear the hitch of his own breathing. And Roland's, deep and unsteady, and impossibly loud in the dark._

_“Actually,” Roland said, as the candles sputtered and faded, and finally gave up the fight, “I'm not so sure we are.”_

_Every day since he'd got there, Alex had woken in the morning, half-expecting Roland to be gone. This one was no different. He opened his eyes to still air, a room that was jarringly cool, and went looking. The first place he checked was the bathroom. There was no message: Roland was in the kitchen, making coffee. He examined the burn on the rug, and then went in. Roland had heard his footsteps. Without a word he passed over a mug, fingers cradled loosely around his own._

_“Everything looks worse in the daylight,” he said, eventually._

_“I'm going to have to explain it. Tell Ian I overdid the tequila, or—”_

_Roland raised an eyebrow. “You were perfectly sober,” he said._

_“So were you,” Alex said._

_“The power is back on,” Roland said after a moment, gesturing at the kettle._

_“When did that happen?”_

_“Late. Early. I didn't notice.”_

_Alex took a mouthful of coffee, almost hot enough to scald. “I need to go charge my cell phone.”_

_“I found it when I was looking for mine,” Roland said. “I plugged it in for you.”_

_He mumbled a thank you. Roland shrugged, from behind the rim of his mug._

_“I wasn't sure you'd still be here,” Alex said, when he'd grown tired of counting the tiles. Every third one was a basket of fruit. He'd never noticed that before._

_“You sound like Martina,” Roland said._

_“Because she's got a point.”_

_Roland lifted his chin in challenge. Alex rose to the bait. He thumped his mug down on the counter, coffee spilling over the edges._

_“You run away, Roland. That's what you do. It's what you always have. And it has to stop—you know that, right? This is where it has to stop.”_

_“I am not the only one who is running,” Roland said stiffly._

_Alex stared at him, mouth agape. Roland stared right back. There was no telling how he might have responded; what else might have been said between them, if the worst moment of his life hadn't interrupted. An electric shock that turned into a juggernaut, crushing everything else in its path, and putting it into a hideous sort of perspective._

_The flight home seemed to take forever. Lloyd was in pieces. The kids veered between hysteria and a calm he found upsetting, and profoundly disturbing. He had to go view the body; had to listen to someone in uniform, telling him Amanda had been busy on her cell phone and must not have looked, before she'd stepped out into the street. The passengers on the bus all backed up the driver, along with five other witnesses. Accidents happened: even to people who'd fought for their lives, and were careless enough to think they'd won._

_It wasn't him she'd been trying to call. It turned out to be a friend. The thought of it tortured him anyway. In those early days and weeks, there was nothing that didn't._

_He had a call from Roland, a few days after he arrived home. When he didn't answer, a text message came instead. It started with a polite enquiry about the kids, and about him. It ended: SHE SAID YES. Alex tapped out a perfunctory reply. They'd spoken on a regular basis, over the years, but he started ignoring Roland's calls—along with everyone else's. Most people stopped making them. Even Roland took the hint, eventually. He still sent flowers to the funeral, or at least, Martina did. Roland wasn't organised enough on his own to manage so much as a Christmas card._

_His world began to shrink. He went back to work, after a while, partly because he had to, and partly to keep himself busy. To all intents and purposes, though, he retired. He shelved his research and concentrated on Jake and Sadie; on trying not to fall apart. Lloyd had always had spirit, shining through the neuroses, but when Amanda died, he turned overnight into a frail, broken shell._

_He retreated into it: and Alex joined him._

_Three months after Amanda died, an envelope came in the mail with a German postmark. Alex checked the time in Berlin. It was something he'd never had to do before, the six-hour difference always there at his fingertips, worked out in his head. He still remembered the number, off by heart._

_If Roland was surprised to hear from him, he hid it well. After the awkward opening ritual—Roland asking how he was, and how Jake and Sadie were; questions Alex had started to dread, because there was only one reply convention demanded he give, one that didn't come close to expressing how they felt—it was almost like it always had been. They swapped news, and nuggets of gossip. Alex had taken on a grad student he thought had potential, even if she struggled with basic definitions. Roland had a new assistant, whose name was Franz. He liked him: he was much more capable than Gerhard, and not remotely interested in going off to hunt for oil._

_Roland had two things to relay about Maddie. She'd been appointed director of the National Roosevelt Observatory, and the word on the grapevine was, she was also getting a divorce._

_“You know the reason I called,” Alex said, playing with his ring. “And thank you. But I can't. Not now...” He slid it to his knuckle, studying the groove left behind. “I can't leave my kids right now, Roland.”_

_“I understand,” Roland said. “I do. But the wedding is almost six months away. Maybe by then—”_

_“Make sure you pass my thanks to Martina,” Alex said. “And please tell her I'm sorry.”_

_Roland promised he would. Alex knew he'd probably forget, and made a note to buy stamps. With the gossip well dry, and the explanations at an end, the conversation drew to a close._

_Five months passed, before events conspired to bridge the distance, and throw them together once again. The meteor shower, the NEO, and then Maddie. Once again real, instead of a name, a half-remembered voice, a face on the news. Standing there in his classroom, working the problem with him and Ella, still so damned wedded to the inviolability of science. Answering her cell mid-conversation, and then putting the caller on speaker, for the three of them to hear._

_“Alex,” Roland said._

_And everything else...followed._

  


  


He didn't meet Martina's eyes when he finished talking. He looked away: feeling awkward and exposed, no matter how discreet the words. He'd still been much more careless than he'd meant to be, tangled up in the memories, and everything that went with them. Martina had made no discernable reaction to any of it. In the periphery of his vision, he saw her nodding to herself.

“I can see why you make such an excellent professor,” she said. “You're very good at explaining things, Alex. Keeping them simple.”

“Tell that to Ella Barlow,” Alex said. He finally dared look over, elaborating, “The grad student I mentioned. She still can't remember Kepler's Third Law.”

“Roland preferred to dazzle me with jargon,” Martina said. “He knew perfectly well that it bored me, but that never prevented him from trying.”

“He loved what he did. His work was his life. His deep, abiding passion... Just like you, Martina. If you ever doubt that...” He hesitated, then pushed on. “If I've said anything to make you doubt that...”

“I don't,” she said. She smiled, passing a hand over her newspapers, and resting it on top. “These aren't why I came here, you know. Not really.”

He smiled back, already well aware. “Something wrong with my scrapbooking skills?”

“I came because I knew you would understand.”

“When you lose a spouse...” Alex began.

“Not about being widowed. Not about being a single parent...” Martina looked him right in the eyes, her gaze dry and level. “About Roland.”

He felt his stomach dip. Martina forged ahead.

“After he died, I went to stay with my mother. It was too painful to be at home. And she has been wonderful: with me, with her grandson. But I couldn't stay there forever. Eventually, I had to go back. It's not just my family: my friends—Roland's friends. Franz, and everyone at the Institute... They've all been so helpful. So very anxious to please.

“But none of them can understand what it was like to lose him. And how it feels, to go on without him.”

“Martina...” He swallowed hard, not sure what she was saying. “If I could have done something more up there, to bring him back to you...”

“I know,” she said. “Oh Alex, I _know_. I was at mission control in Darmstadt. I heard it all. I know exactly what happened. Hard as it is to accept: there was nothing anyone could have done. Roland, Sergei, you... You did the only thing you could.”

For a second he was back there: in the cramped confines of the module, listening in incredulous horror to Roland telling him he was stuck, ordering Sergei to follow through with his instinctive desire to bolt. “I know what I _should_ have done,” he said, still staring out at the harsh, lunar landscape. “I should have fought harder when General Vaughn brought in the other advisory team. I should have told the President our plan would work, even if I wasn't a hundred percent sure of it. I should have worked faster, assembling the machine. I should have designed a better damn machine in the first place... And I should never, _ever_ have allowed Sergei to press that button.”

“Don't be so stupid,” Martina snapped, unexpectedly sharp. “You have children who need you. What good would it have done them, if all four of you had died?”

He glanced up at the moon. It stared implacably back. “Do you know much about the moon landing? Back in '69?”

Martina looked confused by the change of subject. She considered the question, trusting where it led. “'One small step for man'. Everyone remembers that. And the names of the astronauts: Neil Armstrong. Buzz Aldrin.”

“The one everyone forgets is Michael Collins,” Alex said. “He piloted the command module. He stayed in orbit, while Armstrong and Aldrin took the lander down to the moon. Landing wasn't the only dangerous part: so was getting back up. And if something had gone wrong, and they couldn't...then Collins would have had to leave them behind. Turn and head back to Earth, without them.”

“He would still have been a hero.”

“That wouldn't have made it any easier to live with.”

Martina drummed her fingers on the pile of paper, studying him. “Roland would not have wanted this. He was worried about you. After you lost your wife. He told me what had happened. He said it went beyond grief—that you were punishing yourself. Hiding in your cave.”

“Yeah, he mentioned the cave part...”

“You were so very important to him, Alex.”

He felt something give way inside him; felt his forehead buckle, and his eyes start to sting. He closed them for a moment, allowing himself the weakness.

“He was very important to me too,” he said.

Martina retrieved the magazine with David Rhodes' article inside it, and Alex and Roland's faces on the cover. “Can I ask you a question?” she said.

He nodded mutely, not yet trusting himself to speak.

“What happened to Patrick Bainbridge? Was it he who advocated—” She tapped at the magazine, quoting from it. “Trying to blow up the moon?”

“He might have done,” Alex said. “If anybody had asked him. He's never forgiven me for stealing his glory. Any more than he's forgiven me for befriending the only man on the planet who was brave enough to contradict him _—_ ” He heard his voice crack, and too late to hide it, swallowed it down. “Roland was always brave, Martina. Even then. It took some nerve to do what he did to Pat, in a room full of highly-qualified strangers. He had more nerve than anyone else I've ever met.”

His memories of Roland had smoothed some of the lines from Martina's face. He still saw too many; far too many for him to be comfortable with, even with the knowledge of what had put them there.

“I didn't ask you to come stay because I wanted to help with your scrapbook,” he said. “Not really.” He let it hang. “No offence.”

Martina's eyes crinkled in amusement. “You've made your feelings about my scrapbook crystal clear, Professor.”

“I asked because I was worried about you. Because I know what it's like. Maybe not in the exact same way—and I would never presume to compare it. But I've been there. It doesn't matter how strong you are; it drags you under. And I wanted to make sure you were... Well, doing okay...” He trailed off, realising Martina had been sitting there in silence, while he struggled his way through. “I'm being a patronising ass, aren't I?”

“Just kind,” Martina said. The ghost of a smile flickered on her lips. “The newspapers are full of colourful metaphors. The way the moon is broken... The way it's healing...”

“Everything does, in time,” Alex said softly. “Even when it seems impossible to believe.”

“I tell everyone I'm fine. But there are days when all I want to do is hide away, even now. Find a cave of my own, and never leave it. But I have the baby to think of. I carry on, because he needs me to. Because it's what Roland would have wanted. And because there's nothing else I _can_ do. You do it because you have to. For the person you loved; and for the only thing in this world you still have left of them.”

“I have a question too,” Alex said. When Martina nodded, he asked, “Why didn't you name the baby after Roland?”

“Because it's what everyone was expecting. It's what they would have approved of. And Roland never needed anyone's approval for anything.” This time, the smile reached her eyes. “Thomas was my grandfather's name. I think Roland would have liked it—almost as much as all his prizes.”

“Especially the ones they bent the rules to give him...”

“Yes,” Martina said, face turning wistful. “Those most of all.”

“Sadie was beside herself when Thomas smiled at her,” Alex said, steering the subject away from prize-giving politics: the petty wrangling over posthumous awards, and colours of medals, and specially-created categories.

“He's a happy baby. Very placid, and content.” She bit her lip. “I felt certain that I'd poisoned him, somehow. Tainted him with grief.”

“Babies are resilient. Stronger than they seem, even when they grow up.”

Martina folded back the magazine, to the page she'd marked. “I heard you telling yours a story, earlier.”

“The one about Amanda and the rolling pin?” He felt it prick at his heart, bittersweet. “Honestly, I think they're growing past it. Even Sadie doesn't want books at bedtime anymore. They won't want to listen to dad droning on forever. But I stick at it, for now. It helps them remember. And it keeps her with us. Even though she's gone.”

“If your voice can take it,” Martina said, “I'd like to know what was so memorable about Havana.”

“And I'd like to tell you. Roland's not in that one, though.” He cast his thoughts back, warmed by the recollection. “He was in the Arctic Circle at the time, carving _Roland war hier_ in the snow. There's very clear photographic evidence...”

“Madrid, then. The one with the apes and the dancing. Or was that Gibraltar?—”

Alex stared at her, thrown; for a brief, heart-stopping instant, rendered speechless.

“Roland told me stories too,” Martina said, with an enigmatic smile. “You feature prominently in many of them.” She reached for the scissors, and scanned the text of the article, an unreadable expression on her face. “An edited extract,” she said, thoughtfully.

“You never did get to the end of that.”

“Do you promise not to complain about the mistakes?”

“No,” Alex said, the scissors flashing in the moonlight, as Martina put them back down.

“Then at least forgive them,” she said.

Their eyes locked across the table. He heard it for what it really was; what he believed—and needed—it to be. He wondered if it implied something more, besides. He wanted to ask if forgiveness went hand in hand with love; if he'd shown his hand at the end, or from the start, or if Roland had done it for him. But he left it unspoken, the same way Martina did.

Silence passed between them, peaceful and soothing, taking the edge from the cold. One thing he knew for certain: both of them were thinking of Roland.

He cast a shadow as wide as the moon. He'd left a bigger mark on the world, and on Alex, than either of them could ever have imagined. The world had medals and prizes to offer in return; books and biographies today, Trivial Pursuit tomorrow. Alex had nothing but the truth: the knowledge that it did nothing to honour him, turning marks into scars.

“Are you sitting comfortably?” Martina asked, finally poised to resume.

Alex looked up at the two halves of the moon, inching slowly together, and beaming upon them. Amanda had been the one for fairy tales, passing down Lloyd's stories about the man who watched down from it. Jake had never really bought it; Sadie was too grown up now to need it.

But there were times—just sometimes—when Alex lifted his eyes to the sky, and found himself almost—

 _Almost_ —

“I am,” he said, leaving the rest to speak for itself.

  


  


_“The simple fact is this,” Doctor Bainbridge concludes. “This disaster was entirely foreseeable. It's simply preposterous to suggest an NEO of that nature could not have been spotted sooner. Maddie Rhodes was clearly too busy making wishes on shooting stars to do her job correctly.” Leading members of the scientific community have been quick to dismiss these allegations. Doctor Ian Wilson, of Jodrell Bank in England, says they are “pure poppycock”. He goes on to call Bainbridge “a supercilious windbag”, and adds: “You can quote me on that.”_

_“Every observatory in the world missed it,” Doctor Wilson says, “in spite of the advanced technology we now have at our disposal. This was an unprecedented turn of events: it was not a case of human error, or even equipment malfunction. Trying to apportion blame is rather a case of closing the gate after the horse has bolted. Do we have lessons to learn? Most definitely. An object of that mass, in collision with the moon, should have destroyed it. Our entire understanding of science has been called into question. Answering that question is now our priority.”_

_NASA has already announced plans to return to the moon. A White House source reveals that a long-mooted, manned mission to Mars is also on the agenda, in collaboration with the European Space Agency, and counterparts from China, Russia, India and Japan. J. Robert Kingsley views this enduring spirit of fellowship as one of the positives to emerge from Taylor's handling of the crisis. “He knocked a few heads together at the UN,” he says. “There's no denying that. But let's not forget the team they finally sent up to the moon. One astronaut was American, so the other had to be Russian. Even in the face of extinction, politics wins the day. There's still a hell of a lot more that divides us, than brings us together.”_

_The words of the late Roland Emerson would seem to disprove his point. That the lunar operation was effectively a suicide mission for those involved was kept from public knowledge, even after the impending impact was exposed. Records show that Taylor and his allies felt the truth would dampen voter morale. Doctor Emerson adhered to this dictate when interviewed by a German news crew, shortly before leaving for the launch facility in Kazakhstan. He spoke, instead, of his confidence in his colleagues: Batterton, Pitinkov and Kittner, the latter an acquaintance from his work with the space program. Asked what he hoped to gain by going to the moon, Emerson said simply this: “The future.”_

_It's a legacy that unites our lonely, fractured planet. It is also, perhaps, a fitting epitaph._

  


**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the [memo by William Safire](http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/In_Event_of_Moon_Disaster), who drafted contingency plans and a speech for Nixon to deliver, in the event of Armstrong and Aldrin being stranded on the moon.


End file.
